Main navigation

Scale Jenkins to Hundreds of Endpoints with DeployHub

Need to Scale Jenkins? Meet DeployHub’s New Plugin.

I’ve had several people ask me how DeployHub scales Jenkins to support a deployment that requires thousands of endpoints. This question is mostly important to environments that do not want to rely on Jenkin’s slaves, have thousands of endpoints in a software deployments and have had difficulty implementing continuous deploy. This question also comes up around distributed build workflows where the steps are sent across slaves. Both DeployHub and Meister can help scale a Jenkins distributed workflow using their plugin.

Agentless Makes it Easy

First, DeployHub can be called by Jenkins, and it is agentless. When you perform a software deployment with DeployHub, there is no need to install agents on every endpoint, virtual machine or container. Jenkins is used to execute continuous delivery processes, but instead of executing a one-off deploy script, you hand over the heavy lifting to DeployHub. DeployHub manages the low level logic of the deployment and infrastructure configuration management and performs the delivery, reporting back all critical information and reports.

Meister Can be Called by Jenkins to Execute More Complex Tasks

In the same way, Meister can be called by Jenkins to execute a more complex compile/link/test workflow that must be done across multiple servers. Meister’s workflow engine performs these lower level tasks and incorporates all of the load balancing and server pooling needed to maximize the efficiency of large distributed continuous integration processes.

Remote Agent Server Pools

Because we wanted to get down to the real numbers, we did some heavy stress testing around large continuous deploy tasks. Check out the whitepaper for the results. This also addresses how to connect DeployHub to Jenkins in order to off load the heavy lifting from the CI Server. And yes, this is done WITHOUT AGENTS! No proper software deployment (ARA) solution should use agents at this point – don’t you agree?